Category Archives: Flowers

You’re Living in the Wrong Place!

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It’s one thing to say something to yourself, and it’s another to hear it from a complete stranger. We currently have two medical students staying with us in our spare bedrooms. I was welcoming them, showing them around and introducing them to the animals and showing them all of our tropical plants in our living room. “…This is the coffee tree with coffee berries that are turning red!”

And this is the banana tree, and the avocado trees, and the citrus collection, and pomegranate, and the Dracaena palm and the aloe vera, and the orchids and this here is our latest collection: a pineapple plant with a mini-pineapple growing on it:


Our pineapple plant we got at Home Depot in Greeley

After I finished with our little botanical tour in our tropical hotel lobby of a living room, one of them exclaimed, “It looks like you’re living in the wrong place! You should be living somewhere tropical.” How right she was. It is funny to hear a stranger point out the most obvious thing you’ve been working for. I suppose our house and lifestyle here really do point to our desire to live in the tropics with lots of warm-loving plants, chickens roaming about and people hosted at our home in the style of a guesthouse. We do it as best we can in Colorado, so I am sure when we move to Puerto Rico we’ll be ready to do the real thing in the right place. In the mean time, we’re starting to amass quite the collection of all things tropical right here in the wrong place! 🙂

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Signs of Spring

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Well, there is still about a week left of March, so I hope I’m not jumping the gun or jinxing anything, but the weather has been spectacular these last few days! 80 degrees and sunny. Mild evenings. Everyone is outside in the parks or on their porches enjoying it. It really feels like Puerto Rico! But we have to be careful because March in Colorado is one of the most fickle months. Often one of the snowiest and windiest. But so far this year, March has been so beautiful. And if feels like spring has truly sprung.


Crocus in our yard -first flowers of spring

We’ve filed (and paid!) our taxes. Britton has moved the chicken coop out of the greenhouse and into the yard again (their summer home). We’ve planted a few early seeds like lettuce, spinach, cabbage and the like in the greenhouse and in the garden area. And we’re already seeing lettuce seedling volunteers from last year come in! And of course the tulips. One of my favorite flowers that I will miss in Puerto Rico because they need a cold season to be perennials.


Tulips coming up and volunteer lettuce (upper right)

All of our fruit trees are looking healthy and have little leaf buds ready to burst open (or have!).


These are apricot flowers from our fruit cocktail tree -looks like we might have quite a few apricots!!

It’s amazing how much better we feel in the spring/summer. 80 degree sunny weather is just about perfect. I can see why we have chosen a place in Rincon that stays this temperature year round! When it is like this here in Colorado it erases all those miserable windy, icy, snowbound and dark days. Everything is waking up and is re-energized with life. We are out walking and biking, and we are spending more time with friends and family. It is great!

Another sign of spring: We even were able to balance and stand a few of our chicken eggs upright on the spring solstice! They say you can only do it on the spring solstice, but I have no idea if that’s true or not. In any case, we managed to get a few of our eggs to stay up. Pretty cool.


Balancing and egg to stand upright on the spring solstice -first day of spring

 

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Rincon Trip Goal Outcome

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Don’t worry, we did spend some time at the beach too! 🙂

Well we had a list of things we wanted to do on this trip; some for fun, some for utility. Of course, we often put off the fun and do the work first, but I think we did pretty good overall.

Here were our goals: what we didn’t get to are in red, and what we accomplished are in green.

* Plant banana trees (BK)
* Visit with ARC ENG -the architecture/engineering business in Rincon (CK)
* Visit the Rincon Treehouse place to talk about specifics (BK)
* Visit Mangosteen person in Mayaguez if we have enough time (CK)
* CRIM? We haven’t done this yet and probably should (neither really want to)
* Fix up kitchenette to have running water (BK)
* Get estimate for cost of our property ideas by local contractor
* Get hot running water rigged if possible (CK)
* Buy a heavy duty weed-wacker at Home Depot, as the property is probably very overgrown by now (BK)
*Take a surf lesson – if we have time (CK)
* Have a small little fire at night on the property (BK) (A reminder to be careful what you wish for!!)
*Walk to the beach from property (CK)
* Get rest of bees removed from walls if possible (BK)
* Find closest hospital (just in case-ha) -CK
*Find thrift or 2nd hand stores in the area (CK)

So as you can see, we got quite a lot of the major items taken care of in the time we were there. In addition to these things we also:

*Found our trees that we had planted last time and cleared away the vines and growth from around them
*Weed-wacked the whole fenced area and a little beyond the fence line
*Met with a variety of friends in Rincon/Moca for dinners and poker
*Tried new restaurants
*Planted more sprouted coconut palms
*Planted our avocado pits from the Avocado Party (we’ll see what happens!)
*Found a nearby hardware store in Rincon with prices better than Home Depot and a discount day (10% off on Saturdays) for women!

We still haven’t quite made a decision one way or the other about the wood house. We go back and forth and forth and back, sometimes in the same conversation. There are so many pros and cons to either decision. Getting the bees out of the house really helped us feel more comfortable in it and around it. We could see more potential, and less of a desire to “just get rid of it”. Still not sure though. We would have a long way to go to make it feel like home. Next up for it will be bat removal!! Yikes.

I think we have a pretty decent plan to get the cabana very livable and then we can make our big decision on the wood house. It is definitely cool to have a wood house, as it makes it seem more like Hawaii-style housing: warm and inviting and less like concrete storm bunkers, but as we have seen with all the animals in the house it may be a little TOO inviting.  As you can tell we’re still in limbo on that one.


The wood house from the roof of the cabana

In addition to the bats and the bees, we also had some unexpected canine visitors on our last day there, but they were friendly:

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The Weeds of Our Yard

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We went down to Home Depot in Mayaguez (the nearest main city with all the modern amenities you could think of) and picked up a trimmer and some more supplies to finish putting screens on the windows of the cabana. Then Britton got to work trimming the whole “front yard”.

It’s not really a yard in the same way you would think of a lawn in the states. The front area is more of a parking place, but with all the growth from the last 8 months it made it like a yard. Before he whacked the heck out of it though, I wanted to check if there were any plants that I knew of that were good. I still don’t know all my tropicals as well as I do my backyard Colorado plants, but I can tell a mango tree from a citrus or a banana (and there are a lot of mango seedlings too!).

So without further ado: Like sand through an hourglass, these are the weeds of our yard. 🙂 Please help me find out what these are or correct me if I’m wrong in my guess:


Not sure what this is, but it’s really pretty!

The Traveler’s Palm has about three babies sprouted at the bottom of it.

We found more sprouted coconut palms and the one we found and planted last time we were here looks to be doing good.


Here’s the one we planted last time we were here. I know these are coconut palms but does anyone know the type? I think they are the “water coconut” variety and not the meat coconut. How can you tell the difference? How can you tell when they are seedlings?

Anyone know what this is? Is it edible?

Mother-In-Law’s Tongue -this is a houseplant in the states but here it is a yard weed!!

There’s a ton of these types of plants on the steep side of the property. I’m thinking maybe Ornamental Ginger plant? Is the ginger in ornamental gingers edible or good for you?

These aren’t weeds, but they are Mandarin Oranges we found on a tree on the property!!

This one looks just like houseplants I have seen often. Not sure of the name though.

This is just what we found on the first 1/4 acre. We still need to trim down a little further and see the plants we planted last time and take off some of the vines from other fruit trees that we know of on the remaining 3 3/4 acres! It’s amazing how just looking at weeds can be so fascinating. I guess that’s why we go places out of our comfort zone. We learn something new from even the smallest things.

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